System for tracking rides and lessons

Hi! Not sure if this is the right spot but have a pro rider / trainer question. I currently ride and train at a H/J barn and teach a bit too, the farm itself gets paid for the training rides/lessons, and then the farm pays me. I bounce between hand writing a list of my rides/lessons for the month (it’s billed the 15th to the 15th of the months) or typing up some form of document on Google docs. For my and the farm sake I’d love to find an easier way! I do have a calendar that I’m to keep track of my rides/ lessons in, but looking for an easier way to send that to the bosses :slight_smile: thank you for any and all tips!

not for horses but I used an Excel spread sheet for keeping up with monthly/quarterly service agreements

yeah nothing fancy or trendy but did work well for me and for taxes

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I am the most technologically inclined trainer you’ll ever meet (my job in tech before I was training full time was in operations and I lived in Google docs), and I still use a paper calendar. :grimacing:

Spreadsheets were good for sending to the big barns (not my own clients), but the Google sheets mobile app is incredibly painful to use, so that was out. I also tried just putting them on my calendar but at the end of the month I still had to transfer to a spreadsheet or screen shot my calendar, which was even messier.

I treated myself got a nice notebook from Equifit with my logo (https://equifit.net/collections/customlab/products/the-custom-notebook-2), swapped out the plain notebook for a calendar book, and it lived in my truck so when I left the barn I could just write down what I did. At my peak I was riding at 3 barns plus had my own clients. At the end of the month I flipped through, tallied everything up, and did an invoice. I just have my own clients now (7 of them) and still do it this way.

I’ll probably move to a more feature rich software that will track more than billing at some point, but this has been the easiest for a number of years now.

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I use Equilab to track my rides - you can set the app up for each horse and if you have your phone on you while you ride (I wear a belt clip) it tracks different metrics - duration, time spent in each gait, direction, room for notes, etc. I love it.

You can create a “barn” and add people to a horse’s “team” and have chats about specific horses. You can also export your trainings to CSV.

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I also use Equilab to track my rides, albeit for my own purposes and not billing. There is both a free and paid version, with the free version having a limit on the number of horses you can track. The paid version would probably work best for you, plus it actually tracks time spent at each gait, turns, etc. and can notify an emergency contact in case of a fall. If you have students with a phone and are willing to download the app, they could join a “barn” and use the app to track their ride. It might get trickier if they ride a variety of lesson horses, but you could probably have a generic “lesson” horse and use the notes section to keep track of who it is. I’m not sure if Equilab translates easily to a billing software, but it would give you some data… assuming the rider remembers to turn it on, lol.

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